


the wind at their backs

by Woofemus



Category: Tales of Series, Tales of Zestiria
Genre: Gen, Introspection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-05
Updated: 2017-06-05
Packaged: 2018-11-09 08:08:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,176
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11100459
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Woofemus/pseuds/Woofemus
Summary: Rose tries to deal with things after Dezel. Zaveid thinks he might be able to relate, even if only a little.





	the wind at their backs

**Author's Note:**

> all the dezel stuff never sat right with me so I guess this is a small vent fic about it, but I also really wanted to write something with rose and zaveid
> 
> possibly some minor berseria spoilers for zaveid

At first, Rose tries not to think too much about everything. It helps that they’ve got more important things to worry about, like finding Heldalf. Plans of world destruction, or whatever awfully cliched plot Heldalf is scheming up, will hardly wait for one girl to get her feelings sorted through. It gets easy to ignore.

Rose tends not to armatize if she can help it. It’s not that she doesn’t like the whole wielding giant swords of fire and firing out arrows made of literal water, it’s actually _really_ fun, but there's something satisfying about being able to use her own strength to cut through hellions. Even when the hellions turn out to be giant monsters that could only fall from fairy tales, a dagger in the neck is the same to all creatures.

The hellions they’ve run into are easy enough, types that they’ve already faced earlier. Fighting might as well be engraved into her soul at this point so she manages to move on instinct, focusing on the battle. Whatever troubles the seraphim run into, Sorey manages to take care of it. Works out for Rose.

Until they get ambushed.

Lailah and Edna manage to draw away some of them but that still leaves the bulk of hellions facing the rest of them down. Rose grimaces as she narrowly dodges another charge from a boar hellion and leaps out of the way to avoid a tentacle from that weird octopus hellion whipping out to grab her leg. These hellions aren’t hard but they’re so _annoying._ There’s a second tentacle reaching for her and she’s about to make quick work of it until a gust of wind blows them back.

Rose tries to ignore the shudder that goes through her.

“Thanks!” she shouts over her shoulder before leaping back into the fray. She doesn’t need any distractions.

Slowly, the number of hellions are going down. At least, it feels like it. Rose swears more of them have popped up out of nowhere when she wasn't paying attention but that’s fine. She’s got more than enough things to work off right now. Fighting helps keep her mind sharp and in check, and, more importantly, the only thing she needs to do in battle is focus on the present.

“Rose!”

The shout makes her spin on her heels to see where Sorey is. He’s still armatized with Zaveid but his eyes are darting back and forth between the attacks of the hellion trying to claw him and something else in front of him. Rose quickly follows his line of vision.

Lailah is in the line of _three_ boar hellions charging right at her.

_Fethmus Mioma!_

The familiar cloak of flame doesn’t wrap around her like it should have. Rose immediately tries again, snapping open her mouth to cry out—

_Fethmus Mioma!_

A choked gasp tears out of her instead. Rose sucks in a breath, and tries again.

Not even a sound this time.

Her body is trembling, a cold sweat breaking through her. In the middle of battle, her mind is going blank. Faintly, she’s aware of a dagger slipping from her hand. Her hand is shaking, quivering so bad that it feels like Edna caused a quake underneath her. That wouldn’t have been surprising, but Edna is nowhere to be seen, and Rose is running out of excuses for herself.

Rose holds out her hand just as the boar hellions reach Lailah—

_This hand is **hers**_ _, right?_

“Fethmus Mioma!”

It’s Sorey who shouts, summoning Lailah into his body. Zaveid is holding off the hellions as Sorey and Lailah charge up an arte. Seconds later, a wall of flame bursts forth from their hands, and the rest of the hellions are dealt with.

Sorey and Lailah separate and immediately turn toward Rose, running toward her. Rose can barely register looking up at them, doesn’t even know when they’re in front of her. Edna and Mikleo are suddenly there too. She’s not entirely sure what’s going on now. Zaveid's standing off to the side giving her an odd look like he's trying to figure out something, but she can hardly think about him, not when she can barely get her own thoughts down.

“Rose?” Lailah kneels next to her, placing a gentle hand on her shoulder. “Are you hurt? Is something the matter?”

Rose stiffens, eyes focusing on Lailah's hand.

_Calm down, it's only Lailah. I know she won't do anything. C'mon, stop being an idiot, this is **Lailah**. She's been with you the whole way, explaining everything. She..._

_She can take over your body like Dezel._

“S-sorry, I… I just…” Rose can’t even finish her words, starting to shake again. Sorey looks like he wants to say something but he can’t seem to get the words out.

“It’s getting late, we should set up camp,” Edna finally says.

* * *

Camp that night is distressingly awkward.

Rose is gone. Everyone’s quiet including Edna, who isn’t even facing toward them. Zaveid thinks he might have been to funerals happier than this camp.

Well, most funerals he’s been to only involve him and Siegfried anyway.

“I think… we should leave her alone,” Sorey starts though his face says that he wants to do otherwise. He hasn’t stopped looking like a scolded puppy ever since battle. Mikleo meets his gaze and they both let out a quiet sigh at the same time. It’s a little scary how coordinated they are sometimes, Zaveid thinks.

Lailah looks over all of them, a combination of worry, guilt, and shame washing over her. “It’s a miracle that she still believes in the seraphim, after everything that happened.”

“Should’ve told her,” Edna says, accusingly, but there's no laughter or even hint of a smirk on her face, because she knows she shares the blame as well.

Zaveid shakes his head before he leaps to his feet. “You kids are too soft!” Everyone immediately snaps their heads toward him, and while he loves being the center of attention, this is just a little disconcerting for him, not with everyone so serious. “Let Zaveid here do the talking.”

“ _You?_ ” Mikleo’s the one who voices everyone’s thoughts, with just the right amount of incredulity that Zaveid’s no stranger to.

“Trust me,” he says, and he almost wants to laugh when even Edna turns to give him the flattest look he’s ever seen from her. He sends them a wink of assurance, and saunters off. There aren’t any protests he can hear, which means no one else knows what to do either. He reaches up to the hat on his head, smiling wryly.

“I think I’ve got some clue what she’s going through,” he whispers to the wind.

Finding Rose is a simple enough task for a wind seraph. She’s farther away from camp than he thought, but when he comes to see where she is, he’s no longer surprised. They’re on top of a hill, with Rose sitting on a downward slope, facing away from him as she looks over the horizon. The sun's gone down since he's started to look for her so all she's staring at is darkness over a field. Without even seeing the look on her face, Zaveid knows that she’s more than distracted to not notice him.

He remembers doing the same thing.

Zaveid purposely makes his steps as loud as he can, as least as much as he can with his metal boots crunching on live grass. He still doesn’t know much about Rose but he can tell that she’s much different than Sorey, in more ways than one. Just as he thinks, Rose whips her body around when she finally realizes he’s there, daggers in her hands, a cold look in her eyes.

“Whoa, whoa!” Zaveid holds his hands up with an easy grin. “Didn’t come here to make trouble! Easy there, girl.”

“… Zaveid?” Rose blinks, and now she’s back to normal, the coldness disappearing from her eyes as she slowly sheathes her daggers. Ah, what a look it’d been!

He’s lived more than long enough to recognize killers.

“Is that a thing wind seraphim like to do? Sneak up on people?” Rose crosses her arms as she looks at him, unamused. It’s more than clear that she wants him to leave her alone. He wants to laugh.

Too bad Zaveid’s always been a troublemaker. And what sort of person would he be if he were to leave a poor girl out here by herself?

“Nah, sneaking around isn’t my style. A girl out here all alone should really be more careful of her surroundings,” he says.

“… right.” Rose shakes her head and turns back around, staring over the horizon again. “Lailah probably sent you after me. Sorry, but could you leave me alone right now?” She doesn’t even wait for him to leave before she pushes her knees up to her chest and hugs them.

He’s more than tempted to do it. Rose doesn’t seem like the sort of person who spends a lot of time dwelling on the past. Give her a few hours to sort through her thoughts, and she’ll be more than over it, apologizing in the morning for worrying everyone. Sheps and Lailah would accept it, probably Mikky Boy too. Edna wouldn’t say anything, and only Zaveid would be the only one to notice the tremble behind her voice.

Just because she doesn’t think about it doesn’t mean it’s _not_ there, though. And, he knows, first hand, that bottling that stuff up doesn’t do _anyone_ good.

“It’s scary, isn’t it?” he asks instead. Rose startles, not realizing he’s still there. But, clearly, that’s not what she expected him to say. He walks closer and takes a seat next to her, stretching out one of his legs as he props up the other one, leaning an arm on top of his knee. “Not being in control of yourself.”

Rose doesn’t say anything but she hugs her knees tighter. He continues.

“If you’re really lucky, you’re not even aware of it. The nice days are when you just float right on by, not knowing anything. But when you are…” He closes his eyes, the smile on his face wry. “It feels like you’re floating somewhere in darkness. You wanna reach out but for some reason, you can’t, and you just don’t know _why._ ” He opens his eyes, staring up at the stars.

“It all feels wrong. Terrible. Even worse than drinking the world’s nastiest alcohol and waking up with that hangover. Trust me, I’m older than the dirt on half of this continent and I’ve seen _way_ too many things put into a drink that shouldn’t be possible. And drank it!”

That rouses a chuckle out of Rose.

“But this isn’t like making bad mistakes after a night of drinking. At least you can remember those and regret for the rest of your life. No… no matter how hard you try, no matter how many dreams about it haunt you, you’re _never_ going to remember.”

“And then, when you finally have control, when you just _finally_ move, even wiggle your own little fingers, it’s terrifying. You just get this terrible feeling like something bad happened, and it sticks with you.”

Rose sucks in a breath. Zaveid feels like he should stop, but he keeps talking for some reason.

“Sometimes you wake up in the middle of night. Not like from a nightmare or anything, but you just snap awake. Well, it feels like you just had a nightmare, but you can’t even remember what you were dreaming about. You’re moving your hands, moving your legs, moving your body, trying to figure out why the hell it’s so important to you that you can _move._ ”

“When you have your will taken away, and then it’s suddenly given back to you, freedom feels… weird. At first. Then, it feels great. But, after a while, do you even feel like _you_ anymore? That feeling just never leaves you. So you just learn to live again.”

Now he stops talking. He doesn’t think he needs to go on anymore, but he’s run out of words all the same.

Being unknowingly used is sort of the same as being used against your will, he thinks. At least, it does the same damage. Even now, one thousand years later, when he passes out after drinking too much, he’ll wake in a cold sweat, and it’ll take more than a few seconds to remember he’s no longer tethered, and he'll make damn sure that he never will be again.

A wind blows across the hill right now. It feels nice on his skin, but he wonders what Rose makes of it.

“I thought everything I did up until now was all because of _me_.”

The words are so quiet that they might as well be part of the wind itself. But wind’s his element, so it brings her whisper back his ears. It also brings her second whisper, even quieter than the first, a mere breath upon the air. “I’m not the boss everyone thought I was. The boss even _I_ thought I was.”

Even Zaveid can’t help but make a face. It doesn’t sound right, hearing Rose speak about herself like this, but she’s already talking again before he can interrupt.

“I… I don’t know what I’m supposed to feel. Dezel, he just… _used_ me. I don’t even know what he did for his revenge, using my body. Did he kill anyone with my body?” Rose pales with her words, as if she’s starting to realize the enormity of everything that’s happened to her. She slowly looks down at her hands, shaking now, voice a horrified whisper. “Did he _kill with these hands_?”

Zaveid can’t answer that. The only one who can is already gone.

Rose sucks in a choked sob and pulls her hands toward her body, over where she’d been stabbed by the hellion. “And he didn’t even stop until he _died_.”

“I used to wake up and my body would be so tired, but all I could remember from the night before was hopping right into bed.” Rose clenches her hands into fists. “I was having the strangest dreams, like I was flying through the air, but I wasn’t happy about it. No, I always felt so bitter and angry. When I woke up from those dreams, there was just this painful sense of… _something._ Longing, maybe? Like there was something I _had_ to do, but I didn’t know what it was.”

“When he took over my body to fight Symonne, it… it was awful. Like I was awake the whole time, but I just couldn’t… _move,_ couldn’t even scream or shout. Then the next thing I knew, there was something painful burning through me, probably when we got stabbed, but _still,_ it all just… felt… so far away.”

“I know Lailah and the others wouldn’t do something like that but… I…” Rose shakes her head and buries her face into her knees again. “I trust them, but…” She pushes her face into her knees, gritting her teeth. “I _trust_ them… but!”

Zaveid reaches out and places a hand on her shoulder. Under his hand, he can feel her tense up, hears her sucking in a breath, sees her struggling to keep herself together.

“I’m sorry,” he murmurs. With a bit of his power, he blows a tiny wind over them.

Rose freezes before she slowly lifts her head, looking at where his hand is on her shoulder.

“Your wind… is different from his.”

Zaveid grins. “Oh? Already falling for me?”

“Hell no.” The response is so immediate that even Zaveid can’t help but wince. What a blow to his pride! But Rose looks up at him, a smirk on her face. “I’m not interested in guys who can’t put a shirt on.”

Zaveid roars with laughter. “So if I put on a shirt right now, you’ll—”

“Nope! Never! Not even in a million years!”

“Ouch! At least give a guy a chance!”

“I am!” Her voice quiets as she levels an even stare at him. “You’re different than I thought you were.”

“That a good thing?”

“Hm…” Rose pretends to think before she shrugs. “I guess so!”

Zaveid shakes his head, a smile tugging at his lips again. Rose takes a deep breath, and looks in front of her again. “To be honest, I still don’t know how I feel. But I feel kind of better talking about it. So…” She looks over at him. She’s smiling, and even he can tell that this is the genuine thing this time. “Thanks, Zaveid.”

Ah shoot, his face feels a little warm. It’s kind of embarrassing, being thanked like this. “Of course, anything for a lady.”

Rose punches him lightly on the arm, and he pretends to be hurt. They share a look and grin before she looks away again.

Zaveid speaks, “Y’know, you’re not giving yourself enough credit. Even without Dezel, I think you would’ve been just fine. Family’s important, right? Gotta protect them above everything else, and that’s what you did.”

Rose shakes her head, and Zaveid doesn’t press her. She’ll come around soon enough. He’s sure the rest of the Scattered Bones would agree. He moves on.

“You don’t need to believe in me, but,” he stops to nudge his head in the direction of camp where everyone is, “they’re all good seraphim. They wouldn’t pull that sort of thing with you.”

“I know.” Rose casts her eyes down, shoulders slumping slightly. “ _I know._ ” It takes a long moment for her to say anything else but he catches her looking at him out of the corner of her eye. “And I know you wouldn’t do that too.”

He doesn’t say anything else but he shrugs with a grin on his face as if she’s caught onto him. Zaveid sticks around for a few more minutes before he gets up, dusting off his pants. “Well, don’t stay out too late. Sheps is probably tearing his hair out trying to figure out how to talk to you without being awkward.”

“Oh… right. I should… talk to him.” Rose sighs, rubbing at her temples like she’s got a headache thinking about that. He takes that as his cue to leave but just as he gets up, Rose starts speaking again. “Hey, Zaveid?”

“Yeah?”

“… just what exactly did you go through—no, sorry, that’s kind of personal.” Rose shakes her head. “Sorry, forget I asked.” Ah, curiosity. He doesn’t mind talking about it, but even Rose’s serious mood got to him too, and maybe that’s a story for another time.

He meets her eyes before he tips the hat downward, a wide grin on his face. He’s more than free to make what Eizen would call an idiotic expression, here, today, spending a time with a human that can see him with her _own_ resonance. After everything’s done, he’s got more than enough crazy stories for Theodora to listen to.

“I’m just a seraph trying to live as freely as he can,” he finally says.


End file.
